Before the Universe Read online

  Of the many wonders of the red planet, the one that the exploration party had come to appreciate most was the colossal system of subways which connected each of the underground cities of Mars.

  With absolute precision the web of tunnels and gliding cars still functioned, and would continue to do so until the central controls were found by some Earthman and the vast propulsive mechanisms turned off.

  The Mars-Tube was electrostatic in principle. The perfectly round tunnels through which the subway sped were studded with hoops of charged metal. The analysis of the metal hoops and the generators for the propulsive force had been beyond Earthly science, at least as represented by the understaffed exploring party.

  Through these hoops sped the single-car trains of the Mars-Tube, every four minutes through every hour of the long Martian day. The electrostatic emanations from the hoops held the cars nicely balanced against the pull of gravity; save only when they stopped for the stations, the cars never touched anything more substantial than a puff of air. The average speed of the subway, stops not included, was upwards of five hundred miles an hour. There were no windows in the cars, for there would have been nothing to see through them but the endless tunnel wall slipping smoothly and silently by.

  So easy was the completely automatic operation that the men from Earth could scarcely tell when the car was in motion, except by the signal panel that dominated one end of the car with its blinking lights and numerals.

  Stanton led Annamarie to a station with ease and assurance. There was only one meaning to the tear-drop-shaped guide signs of a unique orange color that were all over Mars. Follow the point of a sign like that anywhere on Mars and you’d find yourself at a Mars-Tube station—or what passed for one.

  Since there was only one door to a car, and that opened automatically whenever the car stopped at a station, there were no platforms. Just a smaller or larger anteroom with a door also opening automatically, meeting the door of the tube-car.

  A train eventually slid in, and Stanton ushered Annamarie through the sliding doors. They swung themselves gently on to one of the excessively broad seats and immediately opened their notebooks. Each seat had been built for a single Martian, but accommodated two Terrestrials with room to spare.

  At perhaps the third station, Annamarie, pondering the implications of a passage in the notebook, looked up for an abstracted second and froze. “Ray,” she whispered in a strangled tone. “When did that come in?”

  Stanton darted a glance at the forward section of the car, which they had ignored when entering. Something—something animate—was sitting there, quite stolidly ignoring the Terrestrials. “A Martian,” he whispered to himself, his throat dry.

  It had the enormous chest and hips, the waspish waist and the coarse, bristly hairs of the Martians. But the Martians were all dead.

  “It’s only a robot,” he cried more loudly than was necessary, swallowing as he spoke. “Haven’t you seen enough of them to know what they look like by now?”

  “What’s it doing here?” gulped Annamarie, not over the fright.

  As though it were about to answer her question itself, the thing’s metallic head turned, and its blinking eyes swept incuriously over the humans. For a long second it stared, then the dull glow within its eye-sockets faded, and the head turned again to the front. The two had not set off any system of reflexes in the creature.

  “I never saw one of them in the subway before,” said Annamarie, passing a damp hand over her sweating brow.

  Stanton was glaring at the signal panel that dominated the front of the car. “I know why, too,” he said. “I’m not as good a linguist as I thought I was—not even as good as I ought to be. We’re on the wrong train—I read the code-symbol wrong.”

  Annamarie giggled. “Then what shall we do—see where this takes us or go back?”

  “Get out and go back, of course,” grumbled Stanton, rising and dragging her to her feet.

  The car was slowing again for another station. They could get out, emerge to the surface, cross over, and take the return train to the library.

  Only the robot wouldn’t let them.

  For as the car was slowing, the robot rose to its feet and stalked over to the door. “What’s up?” Stanton whispered in a thin, nervous voice. Annamarie prudently got behind him.

  “We’re getting out here anyhow,” she said. “Maybe it won’t follow us.”

  But they didn’t get out. For when the car had stopped, and the door relays clicked, the robot shouldered the humans aside and stepped to the door.

  But instead of exiting himself, the robot grasped the edge of the door in his steel tentacles, clutched it with all his metal muscles straining, and held it shut!

  “Damned if I can understand it,” said Stanton. “It was the most uncanny thing—it held the door completely and totally shut there, but it let us get out as peaceful as playmates at the next stop. We crossed over to come back, and while we were waiting for a return car I had time to dope out the station number. It was seventh from the end of the line, and the branch was new to me. So we took the return car back to the museum. The same thing happened on the trip back—robot in the car; door held shut.”

  “Go on,” said Ogden Josey, Roentgenologist of the expedition. “What happened then?”

  “Oh. We just went back to the library, took a different car, and here we are.”

  “Interesting,” said Josey. “Only I don’t believe it a bit.”

  “No?” Annamarie interrupted, her eyes narrowing. “Want to take a look?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about tomorrow morning?”

  “Fine,” said Josey. “You can’t scare me. Now how about dinner?”

  He marched into the mess hall of the expedition base, a huge rotunda-like affair that might have been designed for anything by the Martians, but was given its present capacity by the explorers because it contained tables and chairs enough for a regiment. Stanton and Annamarie lagged behind.

  “What do you plan to do tomorrow?” Stanton inquired. “I don’t see the point of taking Josey with us when we go to look the situation over again.”

  “He’ll come in handy,” Annanarie promised. “He’s a good shot.”

  “A good shot?” squawked Stanton. “What do you expect we’ll have to shoot at?”

  But Annamarie was already inside the building.

  II Descent into Danger

  “Hey, sand-man!” hissed Annamarie.

  “Be right there,” sleepily said Stanton. “This is the strangest date I ever had.” He appeared a moment later dressed in the roughest kind of exploring kit.

  The girl raised her brows. “Expect to go mountain-climbing?” she asked.

  “I had a hunch,” he said amiably.

  “So?” she commented. “I get them too. One of them is that Josey is still asleep. Go rout him out.”

  Stanton grinned and disappeared into Josey’s cubicle, emerging with him a few moments later. “He was sleeping in his clothes,” Stanton explained. “Filthy habit.”

  “Never mind that. Are we all heeled?” Annamarie proudly displayed her own pearl-handled pipsqueak of a mild paralyzer. Joseph produced a heat-pistol, while Stanton patted the holster of his five-pound blaster. “Okay then. We’re off.”

  The Martian subway service was excellent every hour of the day. Despite the earliness, the trip to the central museum station took no more time than usual – a matter of minutes. Stanton stared around for a second to get his bearings, then pointed. “The station we want is over there – just beyond the large pink monolith. Let’s go.”

  The first train in was the one they wanted. They stepped into it, Josey leaping over the threshold like a startled fawn. Nervously he explained, “I never know when one of those things is going to snap shut on my – my cape.” He yelped shrilly: “What’s that?”

  “Ah, I see the robots rise early,” said Annamarie, seating herself as the train moved off. “Don’t look so disturbed, Josey – we told you
one would be here, even if you didn’t believe us.”

  “We have just time for a spot of breakfast before things should happen,” announced Stanton, drawing canisters from a pouch on his belt. “Here – one for each of us.” They were filled with a syrup that the members of the Earth expedition carried on trips such as this – concentrated amino acids, fibrinogen, minerals and vitamins, all in a sugar solution.

  Annamarie Hudgins shuddered as she downed the sticky stuff, then lit a cigarette. As the lighter flared the robot turned his head to precisely the angle required to center and focus its eyes on the flame, then eye-fronted again.

  “Attracted by light and motion,” Stanton advised scientifically. “Stop trembling, Josey, there’s worse to come. Say, is this the station?”

  “It is,” said Annamarie. “Now watch. These robots function smoothly and fast – don’t miss anything.” •

  The metal monster, with a minimum of waste motion, was doing just that. It had clumped over to the door; its monstrous appendages were fighting the relays that were to drive the door open, and the robot was winning. The robots were built to win – powerful, even by Earthly standards.

  Stanton rubbed his hands briskly and tackled the robot, shoving hard. The girl laughed sharply. He turned, his face showing injury. “Suppose you help,” he suggested with some anger. “I can’t move this by myself.”

  “All right – heave!” gasped the girl, complying.

  “Ho!” added Josey unexpectedly, adding his weight.

  “No use,” said Stanton. “No use at all. We couldn’t move this thing in seven million years.” He wiped his brow. The train started, then picked up speed. All three were thrown back as the robot carelessly nudged them out of its way as it returned to its seat.

  “I think,” said Josey abruptly, “we’d better go back by the return car and see about the other side of the station.”

  “No use,” said the girl. “There’s a robot on the return, too.”

  “Then let’s walk back,” urged Josey. By which time the car had stopped at the next station. “Come on,” said Josey, stepping through the door with a suspicious glance at the robot.

  “No harm in trying,” mused Stanton as he followed with the girl. “Can’t be more than twenty miles.” •

  “And that’s easier than twenty Earth miles,” cried Annamarie. “Let’s go.”

  “I don’t know what good it will do though,” remarked Stanton, ever the pessimist. ‘these Martians were thorough. There’s probably a robot at every entrance to the station, blocking the way. If they haven’t sealed up the entrances entirely.”

  There was no robot at the station, they discovered several hours and about eight miles later. But the entrance to the station that was so thoroughly and mysteriously guarded was – no more. Each entrance was sealed; only the glowing teardrop pointers remained to show where the entrance had been.

  “Well, what do we do now?” groaned Josey, rubbing an aching thigh.

  Stanton did not answer directly. “Will you look at that,” he marvelled, indicating, the surrounding terrain. The paved ground beneath them was seamed with cracks. The infinitely tough construction concrete of the Martians was billowed and rippled, stuck through with jagged ends of metal reinforcing I-beams. The whole scene gave the appearance of total devastation – as though a natural catastrophe had come along and wrecked the city first; then the survivors of the disaster, petulantly, had turned their most potent forces on what was left in sheer disheartenment.

  “Must have been bombs,” suggested the girl.

  “Must have been,” agreed the archaeologist. “Bombs and guns and force beams and Earth – Marsquakes, too.”

  “You didn’t answer his question, Ray,” reminded Annamarie. “He said: “What do we do now?” ”

  “I was just thinking about it,” he said, eyeing one of the monolithic buildings speculatively. “Is your Martian as good as mine? See if you can make out what that says.”

  “That” was a code-symbol over the sole door to the huge edifice. “I give up,” said Annamarie with irritation. “What does it say?”

  “Powerhouse, I think.”

  “Powerhouse? Powerhouse for what? All the energy for lighting and heating the city comes from the sun, through the mirrors up on the surface. The only thing they need power for down here – the only thing – Say!”

  “That’s right,” grinned Stanton. “It must be for the Mars-Tube. Do you suppose we could find a way of getting from that building into the station?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Annamarie parroted, looking for Josey for confirmation. But Josey was no longer around. He was at the door to the building, shoving it open. The others hastened after him.

  III Pursuit

  “Don’t wiggle, Annamarie,” whispered Josey plaintively. “You’ll fall on me.

  “Shut up,” she answered tersely; “Shut up and get out of my way.” She swung herself down the Martian-sized manhole with space to spare. Dropping three feet or so from her hand-hold on the lip of the pit, she alighted easily. “Did I make much noise?” she asked.

  “Oh, I think Krakatoa has been louder when it went off,” Stanton replied bitterly. “But those things seem to be deaf.”

  The three stood perfectly still for a second, listening tensely for sounds of pursuit. They had stumbled into a nest of robots in the powerhouse, apparently left there by the thoughtful Martian race to prevent entrance to the mysteriously guarded subway station via this route. What was in that station that required so much privacy? Stanton wondered. Something so deadly dangerous that the advanced science of the Martians could not cope with it, but was forced to resort to quarantining the spot where it showed itself? Stanton didn’t know the answers, but he was very quiet as a hidden upsurge of memory strove to assert itself. Something that had been in the bobbin-books … “The Under-Eaters.” That was it. Had they anything to do with this robot cordon sanitaire?

  The robots had not noticed them, for which all three were duly grateful. Ogden nudged the nearest to him – it happened to be Annamarie – and thrust out a bony finger. “Is that what the Mars-Tube looks like from inside?” he hissed piercingly.

  As their eyes became acclimated to the gloom – they dared use no lights – the others made out the lines of a series of hoops stretching out into blackness on either side ahead of them. No lights anywhere along the chain of rings; no sound coming from it.

  “Maybe it’s a deserted switch line, one that was abandoned. That’s the way the Tube ought to look, all right, only with cars going along it,” Stanton muttered.

  “Hush!” it was Annamarie. “Would that be a car coming –from the left, way down?”

  Nothing was visible, but there was the faintest of sighing sounds. As though an elevator car, cut loose from its cable, were dropping down its shaft far off there in the distance. “It sounds like a car,” Stanton conceded. “What do you think, Og – Hey ! Where’s Josey?”

  “He brushed me, going toward the Tube. Yes – there he is! See him? Bending over between those hoops!”

  “We’ve got to get him out of there! Josey! ” Stanton cried, forgetting about the robots in the light of this new danger. “Josey! Get out of the Tube! There’s a train coming!”

  The dimly visible figure of the Roentgenologist straightened and turned towards the others querulously. Then as the significance of that rapidly mounting hiss-s-s-s became clear to him, he leaped out of the tube, with a vast alacrity. A split second later the hiss had deepened to a high drone, and the bulk of a car shot past them, travelling eerily without visible support, clinging to and being pushed by the intangible fields of force that emanated from the metal hoops of the Tube.

  Stanton reached Josey’s form in a single bound. “What were you trying to do, imbecile?” he grated. “Make an early widow of your prospective fiancée?”

  Josey shook off Stanton’s grasp with dignity. “I was merely trying to establish that that string of hoops was the Mars-Tube, by s
eeing if the power-leads were connected with the rings. It – uh, it was the Tube; that much is proven,” he ended somewhat lamely.

  “Brilliant man!” Stanton started to snarl, but Annamarie’s voice halted him. It was a very small voice.

  “You loud-mouths have been very successful in attracting the attention of those animated pile-drivers,” she whispered with the very faintest of breaths. “If you will keep your lips zipped for the next little while maybe the robot that’s staring at us over the rim of the pit will think we’re turbo-generators or something and go away. Maybe!”

  Josey swivelled his head up and gasped. “It’s there—it’s coming down!” he cried. “Let’s leave here!”

  The three backed away toward the tube, slowly, watching the efforts of the machine-thing to descend the precipitous wall. It was having difficulties, and the three were beginning to feel a bit better, when —

  Annamarie, turning her head to watch where she was going, saw and heard the cavalcade that was bearing down on them at the same time and screamed shrilly. “Good Lord - the cavalry!” she yelled. “Get out your guns!”

  A string of a dozen huge, spider-shaped robots of a totally new design were charging down at them, running swiftly along the sides of the rings of the Tube, through the tunnel. They carried no weapons, but the three soon saw why—from the ugly snouts of the egg-shaped bodies of the creatures protruded a black cone. A blinding flash came from the cone of the first of the new arrivals; the aim was bad, for overhead a section of the cement roof flared ghastly white and commenced to drop.

  Annamarie had her useless paralyzer out and firing before she realized its uselessness against metal beings with no nervous system to paralyze. She hurled it at the nearest of the new robots in a highly futile gesture of rage.

  But the two men had their more potent weapons out and firing, and were taking a toll of the spider-like monstrosities. Three or four of them were down, partially blocking the path of the oncoming others; another was missing all its metal legs along one side of its body, and two of the remainder showed evidence of the accuracy of the Earthmen’s fire.